


flesh masks

by fatiguedfern



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Gen, No Spoilers, Nonbinary Character, Platonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-27 15:59:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12585452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatiguedfern/pseuds/fatiguedfern
Summary: Angie paints Kokichi's face.





	flesh masks

Angie picks through shelves lined with jars of sunlight and stardust paste. She hums in thought before piling crystalline flasks brimming with pastel shades of pressed oceans and dawns into her arms.

Kokichi watches through fluttering eyelashes as she sets each jar down into a abstractly framed _V_ \- not unlike that of flocking birds. Their brow furrows. It’s an organised chaos that speaks of a dissonance between Angie’s seemingly thoughtless nature, and a calculated mess.

Tarnished mahogany legs scrape against the floor, chalked lines trailing behind skipped steps. Angie settles in front of Kokichi, legs folding atop the stool. “Hmmm, so what should Angie paint today, Ko~ki~chi~?” She tilts her head with each drawn out syllable of their name, and for a splintered moment, their hands tighten in their folded rest within their lap at the utterance of their given name. But the stretched sound is surely said without malice. Their hands slacken.

“Anything you want, Angie-chan!” they say with a bashful grin that cracks at the murky white foundation she’d smeared onto their face. “I’m just honoured that you’d bother trying to paint an awful liar like myself as anything else.”

Angie twirls her feathered brush between her fingers. “God doesn’t discriminate between liars and truth tellers,” she reaches for a dusty purple, “and Angie never said that she’d paint anything but what God shows her.”

Kokichi remains silent. Angie’s tuneless humming trills throughout the room. To their ear, it sounds of warm, sunlit afternoons clouded with the brushed off chance of thunderstorms.

Angie swirls three hues of blue onto a paint-splattered palette. Powder blue shifts and fades into the dark of a midnight sky, only for the starless splotch of night to brighten with stirred cobalt. 

The first stroke against their cheek is light - a bird’s wing brushing passed a spring bloom. The movement itself prickles against their powder-coated skin almost too lightly for it to be registered. 

The second stroke is harder; it’s arching movement still weighted feather light, yet layered with intent. If they had not been so used to chilling their own features into stone, perhaps they would’ve allowed a giggle to escape their pursed lips.

The third stroke is a writhing thing, twirling below their eye and sloping down against their nose. They sniffle, and distantly they can hear Angie let out a soft giggle. It feels almost odd, experiencing Angie as she is whilst painting. Her voice, movements and very presence itself seem to soften; her sharpened ridges cut from suffocating belief and holy platitudes, dulled. Kokichi almost doesn’t find themself pricked by the needle-tipped closeness to another, almost doesn’t cut their palms on the razor-edged shrapnel of their own suspicion. 

The fourth stroke is a solid, flowing movement that loops around their mouth and across their eyelid. They lightly pull back. Their eyes flit open, and Angie pauses. 

“Is it God’s hands that are painting now, Angie-chan?” they ask, hands aflutter. 

“Of course, God’s hands are always guiding Angie.”

They think of saying something, denying that there was any god in the game other than Monokuma and his puppeteer. They don’t. Angie continues painting her wan-fleshed canvas.

Kokichi keeps their eyes peeled open. They drown in Angie’s own. Her eyes ripple a vast ocean, waves churning a deep blue lit with transcended light. Waves curve heavenwards and roar downwards with the every sweep of her brush.

Kokichi hardly feels their eyes quivering shut again as Angie sets about a rhythm that follows the winding chirps of a swallow’s song. Angie resumes her tuneless humming, though if they listen carefully, they’re able make out a finely threaded harmony.

Between the drone of a hummingbird’s beating wings, they pick out the fragmented story of broken wings, and healing bones. They frown, because broken bones never heal fully when set with stints crafted from fickle belief.

Beneath the low drone, they hear the whispered tale of a ubiquitous being shaped by ancestral fears and brought to life once more by yearning children.

Above the drone and level with the heavens a story of a little girl crossing into a sandbank unfolds. She skips across the beach until her small wiggling feet print a path of dented steps into the sand. Salt laced foam licks at her feet. She’s alone, but surely it was God’s warmth that cracked through the cold heavens and heated her skin.

Kokichi shuts their eyes once more. Vibrant oil paint coloured canvases swim in his vision, even as he seals his eyelids closed. They wonder if Angie could still claim the work as God’s if she had looked at it as they had. Each brushstroke holding a fear and loneliness only embodied by the human flesh.

They feel a crust of well spread paste beginning to set onto their face. “You’re good at this, aren’t you,” they state rather than question. “Painting - painting people’s faces specifically.”

“It was God’s gift to Angie to colour and reshape Their creations, so naturally it is God’s will,” she says whilst dipping her brush into the murky depths held within the the mug set beside. Her voice falls into a hushed murmur. “And practice makes perfect, yes.”

Interesting how Angie’s voice rings clearest when she’s doubtful.  
Angie drops the jar in front of Kokichi, the jar itself rattling into place. “Angie’s sorry, but a mirror isn’t one of the many gifts God left in this room.” 

“That’s fine, of course. I do wish I could see Angie-chan’s work at its full radiance though…” They pout lightly. Paint cracks and they slacken their features.

There’s a sudden rapping of knuckles on the doorframe. Chabashira stands framed by the hallway light. She casts a weary glance in their direction. “Sorry, Student Council business.” 

Angie bounces up, as a jack-in-the-box with a damaged spring mechanism. “See you, Kokichi!” Odd how they’re almost tempted to believe her, but then again liars whose most common victims were themselves were prone to spurting brief, passing truths. An exception to the rule - not that one would be made for them.

Kokichi glances into the dull silver lid. The unpolished metal reflects a melody of oranges and blues and reds and yellows.

Hues of blue bleed through smeared powder clouds and orange curves just below, coral pink lacing through the arch. And just where their chin slopes into their neck, the beginnings of a sun looms, all subtle shades of yellow and gold intermingling.

They cannot tell whether the sun is rising, nor falling, so instead it stays in a stagnant state of halflight. Frozen in inanimate space. It’s fitting, they think, for they too hang in an odd space of midday, unsure whether they’re falling or rising.

Kokichi smiles. It doesn’t feel nearly as forced as their usual painted grimaces.


End file.
